Turkish German Cinema in the New Millennium: Sites, Sounds and Screens

Abstract

Over half a century has passed since the first wave of labour migration from Turkey to West Germany, yet only after the reunification in 1989 did German cinema screens see a real proliferation of films dealing with the phenomenon, being made by second- and third-generation migrant filmmakers. The first examples of what came to be known as Turkish German cinema go back to the 1970s, but it became prominent as an object of inquiry within Anglo-American film studies two decades later, coinciding with a necessary redefinition of the concept of national cinema under globalization. Although several journal issues have been entirely or partly devoted to Turkish German cinema,1 Sabine Hake and Barbara Mennel's edited collection is the first book to focus exclusively on this expanding category of migrant filmmaking after 2000 – the year which, as Lutz Koepnick and Stephan K. Schindler argue, saw the emergence of a cosmopolitan turn in German cinema, urging film scholars to ‘realign their compass of historical and theoretical analysis’.2